I had not realized the Koch's were such a nice family...

[kpete]

.......................

Frederick, the oldest, was an outsider in the rough-and-tumble boys club of the Koch house. "Freddie was a sophisticate, a man of the world, in addition to the fact that he was gay, (which) wasn't easily accepted in those days," said a family friend.

Instead, it was Charles, the middle child, who became the vehicle for his father’s ambitions. According to a friend, the father worried that he had been "too kind to Freddie, and that's why he turned out to be so effeminate. When Charles came along, the old man wasn't going to make that mistake. So he was really, really tough on Charles."

The result was a serious, extremely disciplined man, who along with his younger brother David, would transform their father's medium-sized oil refining business, Koch Industries, into one of the largest privately held corporations in the world. But their success came at a high price.

Schulman describes how Charles, unable to convince brother Frederick to sell his stake in Koch Industries, allegedly resorted to "a homosexual blackmail attempt to force Frederick to sell his shares." And when the youngest twin, Bill, launched a bid to wrest control of Koch Industries from his older brothers, Charles' legal team responded by releasing a dossier of opposition research on Bill, filled with sordid details of his personal life.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/17/koch-brothers-book_n_5342694.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

[tech3149]

1. Keep this article in your refrences

Much of the Koch brothers’ ideology can be found in Harry Koch’s newspaper editorials of nearly a century ago. Take, for instance, the Kochs’ current fight against Social Security. Harry Koch took part in a multi-year right-wing propaganda campaign to shoot down New Deal programs. Grandfather and grandsons employ eerily familiar talking points to bash government pension and welfare programs.

“No political system can possibly guarantee either a national economic security or an individual standard of living. Government can guarantee no man a job or a livelihood,” Harry Koch wrote on February 1, 1935, nine months before Charles Koch was born.

http://exiledonline.com/the-birth-of-the-koch-clan-it-all-started-in-a-little-texas-town-called-quanah/

HARRY KOCH WAS BORN in Holland in 1867 to a wealthy German-Dutch family of merchants, farmers and doctors. After apprenticing to a newspaper publisher, he decided to seek his fortune in America. At 21, he set off on a steamer and arrived in New York on Dec. 5, 1888. He spent his first few years in America working for various Dutch newspapers in Chicago, New Orleans, Grand Rapids and Austin until, in 1891, he finally settled down in Quanah, a town that the railroad had established just a few years before. Harry always remained curiously vague and evasive about why he decided to stake his claim in a remote North Texas town, but there is no real mystery to it: he came because of the railroads.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was in the grip of a massive railroad boom. Boosted by eager investors, lucrative subsidies and free land, railroads sprung up connecting every corner of the United States without much thought for demand or necessity. America’s rail mileage quadrupled from 1870 to 1900, with enough track laid down by the end of the century to stretch from New York to San Francisco 66 times.

In those wild early days of the railroad age, real estate speculation was a central plank of the business plan. The U.S. government had given vast stretches of public land to railroad companies, and the companies needed to sell that land to settlers to create customers and pay off debts. And that meant railroads were in constant need of local publishers to promote the countless railroad towns that had been planned and parceled by the railroad companies across the country, with the aim of luring enough gullible settlers with wildly exaggerated stories of fertile soil and prosperity to trigger real estate booms—all so that railroad insiders could make easy money offloading overpriced dirt lots on the hapless settlers.

It's a long article but well worth the read.

[1StrongBlackMan]

5. Ahhh ...

the Koch family is another one of those, "arrived in America with just the clothes on their backs and a nickel sewn into the seam of their coat" immigrants ... except for the whole being born into a wealthy German-Dutch family of merchants, farmers and doctors part.

[justhanginon]

2. I just knew they had to come from

a kind and loving family supportive of one another. It is so reflected in their socially conscious behavior towards the citizens, albeit of lesser means, in this country.
They should be sued for giving oligarchs a bad name. They are just foul people with the money to spread their disinformation and vile positions on everything that does not benefit them personally.

[hlthe2b]

3. A family of sociopaths... I am so glad they have finally been exposed.

[Faux pas]

4. Rich folks

family values

[Gothmog]

6. The Koch Brothers are evil and hate sunshine

The Kochs are not nice people

[JEB]

7. I bet they love the NSA

and all the other spying our corporate owned government does on citizens and activists. They want what they want and they are happy to destroy anybody or anything that gets in their way.